CONCENTRATION 753the work for which it was intended, and does it well, and there's going
to be no more change in that axle!"
He turned and walked away, and from that day until this, the rear
axle construction of the Ford automobile has remained substantially
the same. It is not improbable that Mr. Ford's success in building and
marketing automobiles has been due, very largely, to his policy of
consistently concentrating his efforts behind one plan, with but one
definite purpose in mind at a time.
A few years ago I read Edward Bok's book Man from Maine,
which is the biography of his father-in-law, Mr. Cyrus H. K. Curtis,
the owner of the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal, and
several other publications. All through the book I noticed that the
outstanding feature of Mr. Curtis's philosophy was that of concentrated
tffort behind a definite purpose.
During the early days of his ownership of the Saturday Evening
Post, as he was pouring money into a losing venture by the hundreds of
thousands of dollars, it required concentrated tffort, backed by courage
such as but few men possess, to enable him to carryon.
Read Man from Maine. It is a splendid lesson on the subject of
Concentration and it supports, to the smallest detail, the fundamen-
tals upon which this lesson is based.
The Saturday Evening Post is now one of the most profitable mag-
azines in the world, but its name would have been long since forgotten
had Mr. Curtis not concentrated his attention and his fortune on the
one definite purpose of making it a great magazine.
COMMENTARY
Man from Maine was reprinted as recently as 1993 but at this writing it is not in
current stock at either Barnes & Noble or Amazon. There are, however, used
copies available through both. and no doubt used-book dealers would also be
able to locate copies.